Too Many Cooks

by Joanne Pence

  “I want to be.” She looked ready to cry.

  Angie felt sorry for her and knew how important it was to take her mind off her man troubles. “Well, good then. I was sitting here thinking about all the kooks who call. I had one guy who phoned all the time and insisted he speak to Rush Limbaugh. I finally told him I was the chief feminazi and he never called back.”

  Just then, the fly fisherman left and Angie and Lacy went into the studio booth. Lacy tucked a loose strand of hair behind an ear. Her hands shook. “Let’s move these partitions so you won’t be distracted by the engineer or others who might walk by.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, yes. You want to do your best.”

  They moved the screens.

  Angie sat in Henry’s chair and watched as the clock’s minute hand pointed straight up and then the second hand ticked off the remaining time until noon. She pressed the earphones close against her ears, but she couldn’t hear The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

  “There’s no music,” she whispered to Lacy.

  Lacy turned toward the engineer’s booth but she couldn’t see him, because of the screens. She leaned toward Angie. “That’s because it’s Henry’s music, not yours.”

  Angie looked stricken. She glanced at the clock. Time to start talking, past time to start, in fact. She sat up in her chair feeling badly rattled, as all the great opening lines she’d practiced flew right out of her mind.

  “Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I know I don’t exactly sound like Chef Henri, and that’s because I’m not.”

  She glanced at Lacy, who was busy chewing a stubby fingernail. Angie licked her lips and went on.

  “My name’s Angelina Amalfi, sitting in for Chef Henri, who’s having a very special lunch today. I’ve spoken to many of you in the past when you’ve called in to ask Chef Henri about food preparation.”

  For some reason, she glanced at the microphone. Just as they tell mountain climbers never to look down, seeing the microphone made the full impact of what she was doing hit her. There she sat, with every word she spoke going out over the airwaves all over the greater Bay Area, whether anyone was listening or not. Her mouth grew dry, perspiration beaded on her forehead, and her mind went blank.

  “So…so now, instead of talking to you on the phone, I can sit here and talk to myself like Chef Henri does. I mean, talk into this mike, without any feedback. I don’t mean talk to myself, of course….”

  Angie swallowed hard. She’d never, ever make fun of Henry again.

  “Well, why don’t we go to the phones?” She glanced at the monitor. Not a single call had come in. She wiped her forehead. “Let me give you those numbers, first. Today, why don’t we talk about all the good things we can get right here in San Francisco? Being a port city and all. I mean, I’ve met people from the middle part of the country who’ve never eaten an artichoke. Can you imagine? Probably not even a kiwi. Now, on the East Coast there are a lot of different kinds of fruits and vegetables, but I don’t know what they are.” Oh, me, she sighed. Should she slash her wrists now or later?

  The call monitor was lit up, but Lacy hadn’t handed her the name of the caller or the topic. “Oh, a caller,” Angie said. At least someone was there. She hit the open-line button. “Welcome to Lunch with Henri. This is Angie. How may I help you today?”

  The light on the line went out.

  “Hello?” Angie said once more and then looked again at the microphone. “I must have hit the wrong button, folks.” She gave a halfhearted laugh. “Whoever it was, be sure to call back, and we’ll put your call right to the front of the line! No waiting for you. No sirree.”

  The line remained empty.

  “Angie.” She looked up. Lacy stood before her, then reached over and shut off Angie’s microphone. “No one’s going to call.”

  “What are you doing?” Angie took off her headphones.

  “I’m sorry. I should have stopped you earlier, I guess, but I was afraid you’d walk out. I couldn’t let you walk out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I…I changed my mind about you doing Henry’s show. I told the engineer to spend the hour playing golden oldies.”

  Angie stood. “What?”

  “I had to see you alone—because of this.” She took a gun out of her purse.

  Angie backed up until she bumped into a partition. “Lacy, no!”

  Paavo sat on one side of the desk in the small office at the back of LaTour’s restaurant and faced Henry. “I appreciate your willingness to discuss these accounts with me,” he said. Henry had stacked books of payables and receivables on the desk before them.

  “No problem. Anything I can do to cooperate in finding the murderer of our fellow chefs is fine with me. Especially since, I hasten to remind you, Inspector, I too was threatened.”

  Paavo studied Henry as he spoke those words. The man looked and sounded surprisingly sincere. Of course, Paavo had also witnessed more than one murderer declare his innocence in equally compelling terms. “I remember, Mr. LaTour. Now, before hiring Mark Dustman, were you the head chef at your restaurant?”

  “I still am, actually. But I spend much time on the sidelines, so to speak, doing my radio show and writing cookbooks.”

  “Who orders the food for the restaurant?”

  “I do—er, did. Now, I leave it up to Mr. Dustman.”

  “Let’s look at these books.”

  Henry put on his reading glasses and still had to hold his head back abnormally far in order to see the columns.

  “As you can see,” Paavo said, “each month since November, your expenses have exceeded your income.”

  “Yes. It’s the recession, you know.”

  “I’m sure. Let’s check that.” Paavo looked at the gross income figures for the past six months and saw they were surprisingly consistent. “If gross income is consistent, it must be that your expenses have increased.”

  Henry looked puzzled. “If anything, we’ve been doing all we could to economize. I’ve even taken to going to”—he shuddered—“places like Costco to get some standard supplies. Please, don’t let word of that get out!”

  “Generally you deal with a set group of food and restaurant wholesalers?”

  “Yes. DMP Distributors, Rose’s Kitchen; you know them, don’t you? We go to markets for special items, not the routine.”

  Paavo didn’t know them at all, but that was okay; at least he’d managed to turn Henry’s attention to the food expenses. He was curious to see if Henry would notice the same kinds of things Angie did—if Angie was right. She knew food, but she’d never worked in a restaurant before this little stint at LaTour’s—not that he knew of, anyway.

  “See, here are the food expenses,” Henry said. “I hadn’t had time to make many changes in my menu since August, so these items will be remarkably consistent. I hardly had to think about them, in fact. I had standard orders for most deliveries.” He began to flip through the pages. “Let’s start with August. The bottom line is all we need. Here’s September, about the same as August. Same for October. Just like I told you. And now, November—”

  He stopped short.

  “What is it?” Paavo asked.

  “Just a minute,” Henry said, light beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead. “There’s something wrong here.”

  Paavo, too, looked at the numbers. “November’s expenses seem to be about ten thousand dollars higher than October’s. Can you explain it?” Paavo asked.

  “I…I’m not sure. Normally, everything is so simple in a restaurant. You buy raw ingredients cheap, cook them, then sell them for a lot more money. That’s it. Here, we have a list of the cost of the raw ingredients.” Henry’s fingers covered his mouth as he looked again at the November figures. After a while, he turned to December, then scanned what had been completed so far for January.

  Paavo also peered at the numbers. “If it’s so simple, can you tell me why November and December are both almost ten thousand dollars hi
gher than previous months?”

  “I have no idea.” Henry was sweating profusely at this point.

  “Do you keep these books, Mr. LaTour?”

  “No. I don’t have much of a head for figures, I’m afraid. My wife does the bookkeeping.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes. She’s a regular wizard at numbers. Can do a lot of math in her head even.”

  “Does she also do the banking?”

  Henry wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Yes.” He flipped to the back pages where Lacy listed out details of the various columns. “Saffron, truffles,” he muttered, mopping his brow, “beluga—Oh, my!”

  “Mr. LaTour?” Paavo said. The restaurateur looked ready to faint.

  “I—I’m sorry, I just…” He swallowed, staring glassy-eyed at the books.

  “Did you authorize the purchase of those foods?”

  He shook his head, nearly on the verge of tears.

  So Angie was right.

  “What happened, Mr. LaTour,” Paavo asked, “to make November, December, and January different from the prior months?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No?”

  “None! Believe me. I don’t understand it myself.”

  “You never checked these books?”

  “No. Why should I? I trust my wife.”

  “Do you realize, Mr. LaTour, that the way these books are written, it appears that phony expenses of food were placed in the account books to siphon off ten thousand dollars each month?”

  Henry looked from one page to the next. “It does appear that way.”

  “Does anyone besides Mrs. LaTour work on these books?”

  “No one.”

  “No accountant?”

  “None.”

  “Tax preparer?”

  “Lacy does our taxes.”

  Paavo looked at him skeptically.

  “She saves us lots of money.”

  “I’m sure she does.”

  Henry riffled the pages back and forth, leafing madly through them. “I don’t understand it. I just don’t!” He looked frightened and confused. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Perhaps you can tell me where I can find Mrs. LaTour.”

  “You think she was taking this money?” Henry asked. “She wouldn’t! What reason would she have?”

  “I have reason to believe this money was going to Karl Wielund. It looks like he was blackmailing her. Now he’s dead.”

  “You think Lacy was being blackmailed? That she killed Karl? It’s not possible! For one thing, she never said a word to me about it.”

  Paavo didn’t think he had to point out that murderers or people being blackmailed often didn’t announce it, especially not to their spouses. “Perhaps it was because of you she did it?”

  Henry seemed to shrivel. “No, Inspector Smith.” He shook his head and suddenly looked very old. “As much as I wish it were true, I know in my heart I’m not the type of man to drive a woman to commit murder. Not even my own wife.”

  23

  Angie looked from Lacy to the gun and back to Lacy again. Lacy’s hands were shaking worse than glass in an earthquake. Angie tried to calm herself. Somehow she had to take control. “What’s this all about?”

  Lacy glanced down at the gun, letting the barrel drop so that it was pointed toward the floor, and shook her head. “He’s trying to make me take the blame. It’s all coming apart.” She gave a harsh sob and tears filled her eyes.

  “What is? Who do you mean? Henry?”

  Lacy shook her head. “Axel promised me everything would be all right, but it isn’t.” Suddenly she shrieked at Angie. “Why couldn’t you leave us alone?”

  Angie’s heart nearly stopped. “I didn’t do anything, Lacy.”

  Lacy stared at her, and her expression changed from anger to desperation. She placed the gun on the table where Angie had been sitting, as if even holding it had become too much of an effort for her. “Karl was bad,” she said harshly. “He was a horrible person. I didn’t care when he died. He deserved it!”

  Angic inched forward a step. If she could just keep Lacy talking, perhaps she could grab the gun. “Why did he deserve to die?”

  “He was blackmailing me!”

  Angie’s pulse beat harder. So she and Paavo had been right. Wielund was a blackmailer. “Was it because of the kind of films you made years ago? I don’t think people would care much anymore.” She tried to make her voice soothing. “You’ll be all right, Lacy.”

  “You’re wrong there, Angie.” Lacy said. “People care; they always do. And Henry will. He won’t…he won’t want me anymore.”

  Angie could see the hysteria building in Lacy again. “That’s not true.”

  “What do you know? The snobs, the in-crowd, take every chance they can to look down their noses at me. You belong. You don’t know what it’s like to have to claw your way to respectability, to find someone and something that’s important in your life and then have to struggle to keep them.”

  Angie was horrified, both by Lacy’s words and the way she looked and acted. “I’m sorry, Lacy,” she said. “Let me try to help you. Please.”

  Lacy paced back and forth. “That damned Sheila Danning. I should have known she was trouble, damn it. Lousy, stupid little bitch!”

  Danning? Angie glanced from the gun to the glass that looked out beyond the studio booth to the full radio station. No one was there. She inched closer. “I don’t follow.”

  Lacy’s tears began again. “Axel said I was an accomplice. That if he was fingered, I’d be too. But I was just trying to help Sheila. She needed money, just like I did. Over the years, sometimes I’d see Axel. He’d always give me money. He even gave some to help the restaurant—not that Henry knows. But we needed it. It wasn’t so bad of me to take that money, was it, Angie?”

  “Uh, no, of course not.”

  “Axel needed talent. I meet girls loaded with it. New to town, looking for a job as a waitress or whatever. Shit! Whoever said she was going to die, goddamn it to hell!”

  Angie’s skin began to crawl as she pieced together Lacy’s tirade. “Was Sheila Danning making a movie for Klaw when she died?”

  Lacy’s eyes widened. “I said it was an accident!”

  Angie’s stomach knotted as she imagined—no, she knew, from all that she’d seen of those people—the kind of terror that must have filled Sheila Danning’s last minutes. She looked at Lacy with disgust. “You know what happened to her, don’t you, Lacy? You know how horrible it must have been.”

  Lacy covered her ears. “It’s not true!”

  “Did Sheila tell Karl Wielund about her job?” Angie asked, now only about five feet from the gun. “Did she tell Karl that you sent her to Axel Klaw, and about your films, so that when Sheila died Karl began to blackmail you?”

  Lacy wrung her hands. “Yes. He was horrible. A brute!”

  “And that’s why you, or Henry, killed him.” As Lacy just looked at her, dumbfounded, Angie lunged for the gun.

  “No!” Lacy snatched the gun away just before Angie’s fingers closed on it.

  Henry had declared that Lacy wouldn’t kill for him. Much as Paavo wanted to believe otherwise, Henry’s words had the ring of truth. In fact, the more Paavo thought about Lacy, he wondered if she could, in fact, kill three people in cold blood. Somehow, he couldn’t see it.

  “Even if Lacy didn’t kill Wielund, something did happen between them,” Paavo said. “Look at these books. The money didn’t just walk out of your restaurant and into his.”

  Henry rubbed his forehead and then nodded. “Yes. Something did. But I don’t know what, or why. She started acting strange in November. I didn’t understand. I still don’t. She seemed so distracted, so removed. I thought…I thought maybe she didn’t love me anymore.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He fidgeted with his tie. “I guess I was jealous. She kept on talking about Karl Wielund and how well his restaurant was doing. He was lik
e an obsession with her. She even fainted when we heard he had died. Frankly, I was glad he was gone. I thought things would be all right between us after that, just Lacy and me, just like before. But then she hired Wielund’s cook, Mark Dustman. We didn’t need him. We still don’t. The only good thing about him are all the recipes he brought with him from Karl’s old restaurant.”

  Henry’s words triggered something in Paavo’s brain. “Dustman brought you the recipes?”

  “Yes.”

  Paavo tapped his fingers on the desk, searching his memory. If only he’d paid better attention when Angie was talking about food! “Was one of the recipes some kind of veal—no, lamb, or something like that—in some kind of pie crust?”

  Henry’s mouth dropped open. “You mean the filet of lamb in puff pastry? How did you know that was one of Karl’s? Dustman told us no one would know. He said we could—” Henry glanced at Paavo, suddenly realizing he’d said too much. His cheeks turned fiery red. “Dustman said we could pretend it was ours. And I’m ashamed to say I tried to.”

  Paavo leaned back in his chair, deep in thought. “Were you aware, Mr. LaTour, of your wife’s connection with a man named Axel Klaw?”

  “Who?”

  “Were you aware that she was ever involved in pornography?”

  Henry stood. “This has gone far enough, Inspector Smith! I’ve cooperated as much as I can, but for you to slur my wife’s good name—”

  “Sit down,” Paavo ordered. “We’ll worry about reputations later. Right now, we’ve got a dead waitress, Sheila Danning, who was killed last November, and who knew Wielund and Axel Klaw.”

  “November? What? I don’t understand! This Klaw is nothing—”

  “Your wife knew Klaw, and possibly Danning as well. And it looks like Wielund was blackmailing her.”

  “Coincidence!”

  Paavo leaned closer to Henry. “Chick Marcuccio knew you had Wielund’s new recipe, and now he’s also dead.”

  Henry paled and tried to scoot back farther from Paavo.

  “Then,” Paavo continued, “your wife hired Mark Dustman, who knew all these people.” Mark Dustman, who had also lied about knowing Sheila Danning.